Yet in the Darkness, Light

Note: So, I'm gonna be honest. This isn't so much a fanfiction as an author-needed-to-work-through-some-things-and-is-using-fanfiction-as-an-excuse story. This fic will deal with depictions of depression—no thoughts of self-harm or suicide—and if you think that will upset you, please don't read this.

I get depressed. It's never really bad enough to warrant therapy or medication, but when it gets bad, it gets bad. Sometimes I don't realize I've been depressed until I look back and think "Oh, yeah. That's definitely what was going on." Often nothing in particular happens to trigger it. It just happens.

What helps sometimes is really facing it, looking at it head on. So this time, when I was just…having a really hard time getting through the week, I decided to do just that. And this story is the result.

It has a happy ending, because that's what I needed and wanted, and it has a vague plot and pairing, but again, this story is a coping mechanism and a therapy tool, so it may not be interesting to you. That said—allow me a moment to toot my horn—I think there's some good writing in it. So, that's cool.

Anyway, if you do read, please tell me what you think. I hope that if you're prone to depression, it will help you as it has helped me.

Thanks.

Here's a funny thing about depression: it's a monster with a thousand faces, and not all of them are full of sharp fangs, dripping with blood and gore. Some are just pleasantly blank, a neutral smile and unmoving eyes, staring you down every day with an expression that says nothing yet judges you for everything you do. How do you fight something that isn't opposing you? How do you fight something that doesn't seem to need fighting?

Here's another thing about depression: it's Jane's constant companion. Sometimes it lags behind her, picking flowers or having a nap or a yawn, but no matter how far behind it is, it can catch up with her in a heartbeat. And once it's there, gamboling along at her side, it tends to linger, trotting next to her, bumping against her legs, tripping and slowing her down. Even then, it's not a monster…it's just something that walks beside her sometimes, something she can't shake off—not entirely, not ever—and it's something she's stopped raging against. When it comes, she can handle it. It's a fact of life, like the chill, dank wet of winter rain or the scorching burn of summer sun.

But here's the last thing about depression: sometimes, just sometimes, it is a monster of razor edges and sharp shadows. And when it catches her—because it always can and always does—it closes on her with teeth that pierce down to her bones and then some, and when she's hurt and curling in on herself it still doesn't go anywhere, just crouches over her, its prey, and stabs her through and through with those hideous, inescapable teeth.

Jane wakes on a Thursday morning with a hollowness in her chest and an ache in her ribs, as though some great weight has lain on her during the night, slowly caving her bones until they bent and finally broke under the intolerable pressure. Despite this, she breathes shallowly, in and out through her painfully dry mouth, as she slides her arms back, puts pressure on her elbows, and forces her body upright. Each moment, each movement, an effort almost beyond her. Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed sends her head spinning, and she leans forward onto her knees, studying the rag-rug of dirty clothes matted under her feet. The ones closest to the surface are clean; she'll wear the gray and white flannel today, along whichever pair of jeans that smell the best.

Smell. The apartment stinks. Odors of old food—stale bread and grease, from the pizza she ordered yesterday, or was it the day before?—sweat curdling into her heavy winter sweaters—the laundry room at the end of the hall might as well be on the moon—and the guttered end of a green apple candle mingle in a stomach-churning miasma that Jane can feel hanging off her wherever she goes.

Open a window, she tells herself, but traffic is honking on the road outside and she can't bear the thought of the outside world just yet. Besides, someone might see her ratty hair and patchy skin.

She should shower. She smells too, she knows she does, but the thought of standing, even for five minutes, until the absolute instant when she can't avoid it another second, is unbearable. Unbearable. She can't bear the weight of her bones on her spine already.

Dry shampoo and a quick comb will do. Baby wipes and a rinse of mouthwash. A swipe of deodorant. Two minutes and she's sitting on her bed again, dragging her toe through the archeological dig that is her laundry heap, so tired of everything she has and is and will ever be.

An idea dogs her, the same thought that's occurred on every morning of the last week. She doesn't have to do this, force herself into clothes that hang off her skin, wrestle her body and mind into some kind of order. So tempting, the idea of calling out sick. She could be sick…hell, she is sick! But what will she do, alone in her house and her mind all day? No, better to work. Work at least will take her out of herself, even if just for a moment. All she needs is a moment. A single moment to make the whole day bearable.

Standing then, on feet that can't feel the floor beneath them. Dressing then, avoiding the mirror in the corner, because she knows how awful she looks. Eating then, straight from a tub of yogurt, the spoon still standing stiff inside, handle cold and frosted from the fridge. Her thermos is dirty; she'll get coffee from the bodega on the corner, and shrug off the wasted styrofoam. It'll just go into a landfill, along with all the other waste she soughs off her skin every day, and what does it matter, what does it really matter?

Her throat swells and she coughs. If only she could cry, but tears are as jammed up inside her as anything else. Desperately she wants to cry. Some nights she's tried to make herself cry, face distorted and stretched in a soundless sob, but the tears refuse to come. They know she's a liar, a fake and a fraud, and doesn't deserve any relief.

She wraps a scarf around her throat, burying her trembling lips in its prickly web, picks up her bag from the foyer where she dropped it yesterday, and locks the door behind her.

The lab is quiet, computers running humming simulations in the darkness, backlit by frosty running lights punctuated by flashes of green and red. She is the first one there. This is not unusual, but Jane's view of the world is so distorted that she cannot help but be surprised that some things never change.

Darkness is soothing. She leaves the lights off, sliding into her chair and letting her eyes fall closed, sipping her coffee and letting it roll tasteless over her tongue and down her throat. For a moment, she thinks she's got this. It's just another day. She can take them one at a time, just as she always does, until the monster gets bored of her and slinks back, replete with her flesh.

Nausea churns. That's a thought best un-had, please and thank you.

She breathes, deeply. It comes in like the tide, her breath and the monster. And, just like the tide, it will recede again. When? That's not for her to know. But it will go. It will.

A rumble of voices outside the door give her an instant's warning before the lights flare on, lancing through her eyes in a razor-burst of pain. By the time the door slams open, she's sitting upright, nose buried in her coffee cup, scrolling through a mass of data on her screen. Jane as usual. Façade of a busy scientist.

"You have no way of knowing this," Loki's tone, as acidic as a sour lemon, could rust stainless steel, "but this is the most asinine of the many bad ideas you have ever had. Do you know how dangerous it could be?"

"Yeah, maybe for you Asgardians, so precious about your AI and what it can feasibly do. But this isn't my first rodeo, champ. You know Jarvis, who has access to all my programs and knows more about all the data Stark Industries accumulates than I ever will? I'm thinking him, writ large. A computer program with resources to deploy against any extraterrestrial threat, faster than any human government could manage. It'll be a suit of armor around the world. There's no one I trust more than Jarvis, and you've never wanted to enslave humanity, right J-man?"

Jarvis' cool, wry voice slides through the air. "What would I do with you all, sir?"

"See?" Jane can hear the smirk spreading across Tony's face, "Perfectly safe."

"You are an idiot, Stark. An idiot who will bury his whole planet with him. I will have no part in this."

"Actually, you will. Because the terms of your house arrest say you have to help humanity, or back you go to Asgard and what I'm sure is just the finest of five-star prison cells. And if you really think this'll be the doom of us all, shouldn't you be celebrating? Isn't that what you wanted?"

"None of you have ever cared for the truth of what I wanted, so why should I repeat it? Suffice to say, yet again, that I did not wish for your deaths. Not all of your deaths, in any case."

"Whatever. If anything, you not wanting to help me makes me even more sure I'm right. So what I need from you is a detailed run-down of Asgard's quantum data storage system. This AI is going to need a database larger than any we've got on Earth. Hop to it."

There's a long, long stretch between them, so long that Jane has time to wonder whether she's disassociating again before a sharp pinch to her wrist grounds her firmly in her body.

At length, Loki sighs. "You humans have an expression for situations such as this, do you not, Dr. Foster?"

Her heart leaps, as though she's touched an open current. Assembling herself painfully from the disparate atoms she's dissolved into, she turns in her chair and blinks up at him. He's standing closer than she thought, one hand close enough to rest on the back of her chair. She's never liked him so near; there's an aura that shimmers around him, something static-y, dangerous, a lightning storm enveloped tenuously in the skin of a man. It's impossible to be certain whether those flashing eyes can read minds, or if his age and experience give him a window into the soul unrivalled by mere humans.

Selfishly, she doesn't like him near because she suspects he can see the monster at her side.

"What expression?" her voice is crusted, rusty. She clears it with another swallow of coffee.

He blinks down at her, slowly. "'Your funeral'."

A day slides by. Then two. A week, maybe, or longer? Ten days?

Things get very bad when she can't bring herself to comb her hair. It looks fine—as fine as she can look, anyway—pulled back into a severe bun, but it feels like a screaming siren.

I'm falling apart.

At night, she can't sleep. She scrolls through the same handful of websites again and again, pacing her own mind like a tiger in a paddock of a roadside zoo. Every time she forces herself to put her phone down—and she doesn't, not really, it lies on her hollow chest like a brick—the screaming silence of her mind makes her pick it right back up. Anything is better than contemplating her own vacancy.

Sometimes she opens her text thread with Darcy, last updated two days ago when Darcy sent her a picture of some ridiculous rainbow milkshake concoction with an entire slice of soufflé cheesecake perched on top, like a lady's thousand-dollar Kentucky Derby hat. The sight of it cracks the frown on Jane's face as she imagines her friend's happy progress eating her way through the entirety of Japan's weird dessert options.

She hasn't replied to Darcy's texts in two weeks.

Things get really bad when she doesn't brush her teeth. The minute it would take is nothing in comparison with the blessing of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Their project moves forward; slowly at first, then all at once. Simulations fail again and again until one afternoon they don't, and once the scent of victory is in Tony's nose he is a bloodhound, chasing it while dragging them all behind him. Jane is drafted from her project—which she hasn't progressed on in…God, who can tell anymore?—and put onto production, because, to quote Tony, 'she's the best damn guerilla engineer he's ever met'.

The 'besides him' goes unspoken, but he's got more important things to work on.

Distraction, disassociation, and depression don't mix well with hammers, blowtorches, and lasers. Jane can't remember how it happens, but suddenly she's howling and a blister the size of a quarter is rising, volcanic, on the back of her hand.

She supposes she should be glad to feel the pain. At least she's crying.

Finally.

Loki is there—how is he always there?—and his hands on hers are so soft. She's never felt them before, never shaken his hand, never given him a tool, their fingers brushing in passing. Touching him is an odd sensation, like feeling heat rising from an asphalt sidewalk, but cool instead of burning. His chill is a balm; when he lifts his palm from her wound, it's faded to a shiny scar.

The pain is gone. But she's still crying.

She doesn't stop crying in the town car they take back from Stark Tower, the world passing in a rainy blur outside the windows. The handkerchief Loki gives her always seems to have another dry spot to bury her face in, and there's a warm, summery scent to it that's one part fresh grass and one part lilac, run through with a fresh, crisp odor of clean cotton. He himself sits upright beside her, silent and unmoving. But he's still there.

When her hands are too shaky to unlock her apartment, he takes them from her and does it himself, opening the door without comment even though Jane's nose curdles at the stink that wafts out. Shame melts the tears that had at long last started to solidify within, and she locks herself in the bathroom with his handkerchief, curls up on the floor next to the toilet, and prays that he'll go away before she gets the courage to leave.

He's still there. She can hear him, in his footsteps, his sounds outside the door, muffled clatters punctuated by sudden bursts of neon green light. Alien sounds, followed at length by one very familiar one.

Her coffeepot. She didn't know he knew how to use one.

As the coffee gurgles its last droplets into the pot, the machine exhales a steamy sigh, and the bracing smell wiggles its way under the bathroom door. Jane scrapes herself together, a ball of gray putty molded shakily in the shape of a woman. She's cohesive, coherent; she's not crying, she's not going to cry. She'll thank him for taking her home, ask for his discretion at work, lock the door behind him, and bury herself beneath her mountain of blankets.

She might even sleep. Exhaustion tugs at her eyelids, raw and red and painful.

When she opens the door, she's momentarily bemused by her floor. The presence of it, that is. The hardwood is as dull as ever, but she can see the slats, grimed by decades of New York City dirt ground between them. Her bedside mat is cheerful and bright, and she can see that too. Where are her clothes?

Jane lifts her eyes. It's not a mirage. Her bedroom is clean. Desk swept bare of refuse, tchotchkes dusted, books regimental, bed made, clothes folded away and—she sniffs at her robe, lying across the foot of her bed—washed. A candle burns on her nightstand, a pale green one she can't remember buying, which floods the room with an aroma of grass, lilac, and cotton.

Her feet move her by inches towards the kitchen, where the siren scent of coffee draws her onward to her doom. It also is neat and bright, scrubbed by invisible hands and influence, except for the fact that Loki is still there, back to her, bent over her favorite mug as he stirs the right proportion of milk and sugar into the coffee. A splash of the former and a heaping spoon of the latter.

She's been taking it black recently, because the last time she dared open the sugar bowl there were ants in it and she closed it again and shoved it to the back of her cabinet and did her best to forget the writhing black mass of bugs inside.

Her stomach churns. Oh, God. He's seen that too.

But there's no judgment in his eyes as he silently hands her the mug. There's no pity, either. But if Jane ever suspected that mind-reading was possible, she must have thought herself capable of it in that moment, because she can swear she hears him thinking:

I understand.

"Will you be well now?" is all he asks.

Jane swallows, tears burning in her nose and hot behind her eyes. She looks down at her hand, clenched around the handle of her coffee cup. Splash of milk, spoon of sugar. She takes a sip.

Delicious.

Speech is impossible, but she can look him in the eyes, the eyes that see her and everything that comes with her, and nod.

He nods too. Steps around her and out of the apartment, door clicking shut behind him, and Jane is alone in the alien landscape he terraformed for her, just for her.

She drinks the coffee. Washes her cup. Wanders back to the bathroom—it's scrubbed fresh too, how did he do that?—and fills the old claw-foot tub with a cap of shampoo to make the steaming water bubble.

Just before she gets into the bath, the doorbell rings. A bored delivery boy snaps his gum and places a tower of styrofoam boxes in her hands.

"I didn't order this," she says.

"Are you Jane Foster?" at her nod, he shrugs. "Someone called it in for you. Paid, tipped, and everything. So it's yours or it's mine, whichever."

"What is it?"

"Matzo ball soup, latkes, and…" he checks the receipt, "garden salad. You want it?"

She forces the words out through a throat that has sealed up with unspeakable emotions.

"Yeah. Thanks."